insists that the image is nothing other than a relation. Rather than an
object itself, despite the substantive, what we call the “image” is a way of
relating to an object as is any act of consciousness.
The second characteristic of imaging consciousness Sartre calls the
phenomenon ofquasi-observation. He distinguishes three contrasting
ways of relating to the same object, namely, to conceive, to perceive or
to imagine. Using Husserl’s cube as an example of perception, he notes
that it must give itself to perceptual consciousness in a series of profiles.
Indeed, what indicates its physical presence is the infinity of its possible
profiles. Courting the kind of phenomenalism of which he will accuse
Husserl inBeing and Nothingness, Sartre claims that “the object itself is
the synthesis of all these appearances” (Ire 8 ).^4
What Sartre calls our “concrete concept” of that cube is an immediate
grasp of its sides and angles simultaneously as if from inside, without
profiles.^5 Unlike the perceived object, I do not have to “make a tour” of
the object to accumulate its aspects – a potentially infinite task for
perception as we noted. Sartre has always drawn a sharp distinction
between perception and thought “la pense ́e.” We can never perceive a
thought or think a perception: “They are radically distinct phenomena”
(Imaginary 8 ).
So where does this leave imagining? We find features of both percep-
tion (the object presents itself in profiles; we can “make its tour” in a
itself consciousness. It seems that here Husserl was the dupe of the illusion of immanence”
(Imaginary 59. For his reference to Husserl’sLogical Investigations, see 199 ,n. 2 .)(^4) Robert Sokolowski points out that what saves Husserl from phenomenalism (the thesis that
the object is simply the sum of its actual and potential appearances/profiles, a view held by
John Stuart Mill and the positivists) is an additional “judgment of identity” made at least
implicitly by the perceiver that ascribes these appearances to “one and the same” object (see
Robert Sokolowski,Introduction to Phenomenology[Cambridge University Press, 2000 ],
20 – 21 ). In Sartre’s defense, we must acknowledge that this apparently “phenomenalist”
account of the physical object is corrected or completed a few pages later when Sartre adds:
To produce in me the image consciousness of Pierre is to make an intentional synthesis
that gathers in itself a host of past moments,which assert the identity of Pierre across these
diverse appearancesand which give this same object under a certain aspect (in profile, in
three-quarters, full size, head and shoulders, etc.). This aspect is necessarily an intuitive
aspect: what my present intention aims at is Pierre in his corporeality [leibhaftigkeit], the
Pierre that I can see, touch, hear, were I to see him, touch him, hear him.
5 (Imaginary^15 , emphasis added)
He admits that the existence of such concepts has often been denied. “However, perception
and imagery presuppose a concrete knowledge without image and without words” (Imaginary
197 ,n. 6 ).
106 Consciousness as imagination